I had never watched The Bachelor or The Bachelorette or The Bachelor in Paradise—the latter of the three, I didn’t know existed until recently. And for the most part, I avoid reality TV altogether, because I know it’s designed to be addictive and soapy, and because it pains me to see such programming take up our time in lieu of finer pursuits like classic cinema or classic literature or just going outside.
But turning my nose up at reality TV is hypocritical, as I spend plenty of hours toiling away with a video game controller in hand—and those hours could oft be spent better. I guess it’s a matter of picking your poison.
And one day this week, instead of playing the Last of Us Part II, or Rocket League, or Wii Sports, I sat down with my girlfriend to watch the Bachelor in Paradise—and voilà—I’ve got a brand new article on fame.
What does fame mean to you?
Fame, as I type this, first brings to mind the David Bowie song—but typically I’d say fame always makes me first think of Kim Kardashian.
Why?
For starters, she is an obvious, contemporary house-hold-name. But also because Kim Kardashian and her family redefined the rules of being famous. Kim Kardashian became famous because she released her own sex tape with a rapper named Ray J…in 2002. That was 19 years ago—and she’s well outlasted the measly fifteen minutes in the spotlight the tape guaranteed her.
There are of course other circumstances surrounding Kim’s staying power. Her mother, Kris, is a mastermind of media manipulation and her father Robert Kardashian, was O.J.’s lawyer.
But help from family aside, Kim is famous for nothing but being famous. She’s compounded her popularity time and time again and turned it into a career. Kim may not have invented the modern fame economy, but she certainly mastered it.
And plenty of nobodies have followed in her footsteps.
The Bachelor
The Bachelor franchise has become a juggernaut since it’s original season, which coincidentally was also 19 years ago, in 2002.
It is as big to some as the National Football League is to others. And its many iterations, makes me liken it to Marvel’s relentless onslaught of superhero programming—as there seems to be new Bachelor content year round.
And by virtue of the program’s prevalence, its contestants are vaulted into the eye of the public. I imagine from 2002-2010 or so, the sudden fame didn’t last too long. You were on the show, everyone in your hometown gossiped about it for a while, and then it was all lost to Bachelor or Bachelorette history.
But then social media emerged from its incubation period, fully formed as the grotesque beast it now is, and suddenly, nearly every individual under the age of 40 had a public facing landing page, and the word “fame” is now replaced with the word “clout.”
Now, being on the Bachelor or Bachelorette is something different entirely. You can become famous in your brief stint on TV—and you can stay famous, and you can use that fame in all sorts of ways, as our Mother Mary of fame, Kim K, has proven time and time again.
This is best illustrated with the Bachelor in Paradise episode I just watched.
Drama in Paradise
In this version of the show, there are men and women, all of whom were previous contestants on the traditional versions of the program. Now they’re looking for love again—this time on a beach in Mexico. Each week the men and women switch off giving away roses to the current apple of their eye. If you get a rose, you get to stay, if you don’t, you gotta go.
The twist? New men and women come each week to shake things up, and challenge the pre-established connections. I promise I’m going somewhere with this, but first, I have to say, spoiler alert! For whatever episode aired last week:
A guy named Brendan and a girl named Natasha were hitting it off in paradise, but there were rumors that Brendan was dating a girl named Pieper just before he left to be on the show. Then Pieper shows up in Mexico, and Brendan is immediately attached at the hip with her, thus signifying that they were in a serious relationship prior to the show’s start. Natasha is rightfully pissed. And the other contestants are pissed too! Why? Because clearly Brendan and Pieper aren’t here to look for love—they clearly already had it! The others are mad because Brendan and Pieper came for clout, for followers, for fame!
The irony, of course, is that every contestant came here with fame partially in mind—as there are plenty of other ways to find love, that don’t involve a national television broadcast.
But this drama is interesting to me, not because I’m a fan of the show or because I care for any of the contestants; it’s interesting because it tells us about our relationship with fame.
This little story seems to indicate that fame for fame’s sake is bad—but everything in our culture points in the opposite direction.
Fame for Fame’s Sake
All this mumbo jumbo I’m talking about, was essentially just to say this: We have made fame, in whatever form it comes, a viable path for making a living. That’s why Brendan and Pieper are willing to break the integrity (if I can call it that) of the Bachelor in Paradise.
That’s not necessarily how the world worked in the time before the internet.
Take for example, the wild west. If you became notorious for cheating at poker or robbing banks—then you may have garnered notoriety, but that notoriety didn’t equal success. Just because you were famous for being rotten, didn’t mean people cared to know what you did on the day-to-day, or cared to be associated with you.
But today, you can do all sorts of unsavory things, get one hundred thousand followers on the internet, and all of sudden you have a career. As long as you have eyes on your public facing landing page, you have a space that’s valuable for advertisements.
And not everyone who hits the followers jackpot does so through unsavory acts— there are people who used the old fashioned model, and are famous for their abilities; and there are those who went viral by happenstance, but not necessarily for something distasteful.
All of this is particularly maddening for musicians, actors, chefs, and creators of all kinds, who might easily make a living off their abilities, if they had a built-in audience. But the sad truth is that our economy has pivoted from valuing value to valuing attention.
That’s troublesome. That’s Modern Anxiety! And I think it would behoove us all to pay close attention to who we pay attention to.
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